5 Ways to Market your Business Website!

The number one challenge facing a new websites is lack of traffic. Just putting up a website is no guarantee that people are going to land up.

There has to be a well thought-out marketing strategy to drive targeted traffic to your website. The following can be the elements of your web-marketing strategy.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the volume of traffic to a website from search engines by trying to get the site to ‘rank’ higher in the search results. The earlier it is presented in the search results, the more searchers are likely to visit the site.

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The SEO techniques can also target different kinds of searches such as image search and industry-specific search engines. Search engines find and index sites by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ into the Net. These spiders scan the content of websites and sort and rank them according to relevancy. The SEO considers how this process works and what people are searching for.

All search engines encourage new websites to submit their details to them. Each search engine has a slightly different process for submitting a site. It is advisable to follow their guidelines. Some, such as Google, have very detailed instructions to help newcomers. If you submit a site as they ask, you improve your chances of getting a good listing.

The SEO strategies can include modifying the site’s coding, presentation, and structure. Sometimes, there might be features in the site that prevent effective ‘spidering’ The SEO efforts include fixing such problems too. A common tool used is to add unique content that appeals to visitors and is easily indexed by search engines.

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The SEO has become a very popular term nowadays and a number of firms are offering SEO services for websites. Some of these SEO companies use dubious means aimed at fooling the algorithms used by the search engines. They are termed as black hat SEOs. Search engines are quick to wise up to their tactics. In some extreme cases, some sites have been banned from listing on search engines for relying on such methods.

The ultimate aim of the SEO techniques is to help a good, interesting website to get the best listing positions.

2. Pay-per-Click Search:

In pay-per-click search engines, you bid for top-ranking positions for searches under keywords of your choice. For each visitor who searches the keywords you bid on and then clicks through to reach your site, you pay the amount you bid.

The bid amount can be as little as a rupee a click to about a thousand rupees a click. The amount is more for very sought-after key word combinations such as ‘India’ and ‘MBA’. For less sought-after words, the bid amounts are lesser, and it also assures a more targeted set of click-through visitors.

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For example, if you are selling jewellery made from polished ammonites, bidding for ‘ammonite-polished jewellery’ makes more sense than bidding for jewellery. It will be cheaper and will yield visitors specifically interested in what you are selling. The most sought-after pay-per-click search engines are Yahoo, Google, Miva, and Kanoodle.

Paying for click-through visitors is a good way to build traffic in the early days of your business, but once you have established your presence on the web, there is no reason to continue with it. Sometimes, for special promotions, you can go back to paying for click-through traffic.

3. Banners, Links, and Affiliates:

You can ask owners of other sites to put links to your site on their web pages. Firstly, you should shortlist the sites that attract the same kind of visitors that you are interested in. A good way of identifying them is by searching for websites on search engines using keywords you would use to reach your own site. This way you can also identify the sites that attract more visitors or rank high on web searches. You should be careful to avoid sites that are in direct competition with your own business.

Once you have identified the potential sites, you should get in touch with them with a proposal that is mutually beneficial. You should be able to show them how they stand to gain by putting in your link or a banner connecting you to their site.

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Many websites will ask for a reciprocal link or banner on your website. You can agree to this, but you should be careful to ensure that you do not get into too many such reciprocals or your website will start looking like a bunch of links and banners and you will lose credibility among your visitors.

You can also establish a structure of payments or commissions for sites that send you visitors. This is commonly referred to as an affiliate programme. This is easier to implement if you are an e-commerce site and something is being sold. If your payment is based only on visitors being sent by your affiliates, there is a possibility of fraudulent clicks through visitors. To implement a successful affiliate programme the following essential elements must be in place:

i. Establish a lucrative commission structure. Even giving away over 50 per cent of your profits is a justified investment. The next time the same visitor comes to your site, he/she will be coming directly and you do not have to pay any affiliate.

ii. Get software to track traffic and sales generated by your affiliates. This will allow you to keep track of what you have to pay the affiliates. Make sure your systems are transparent and keep them open for inspection by the affiliates. This helps build trust.

The objective is to recruit as many affiliates as possible. The more affiliates you have, the wider will be your audience. The affiliates do all the selling for you and you do not have to pay for it unless they send you paying customers.

4. Free Downloads:

Giving away free downloads on your website can be an interesting way to hook visitors. The free downloads can be teasers, free software, articles, and other useful information. It is important to keep in mind that it should be useful to the customer.

A web dietician can give away free downloads of a new diet he/she is proposing. He/she will be able to keep customers by offering a service that customizes the diet according to the physical and lifestyle differences or he/she can offer a customized service for monitoring results of being on the diet.

If you take customer information before giving away downloads, you will be able to use the data for future marketing campaigns.

To build credibility for yourself and your business, you can write articles to be put up in other websites. At the end of the article, add a brief biography and a description of your business not exceeding a few lines. There are many websites coming up and all of them are hungry for content. You can write and submit your articles to these websites. There are also some aggregators where you submit your articles and these are distributed to other sites.

5. E-mail:

E-mails of visitors can be collected by getting them to opt in for a free download or to subscribe to a newsletter. A regular newsletter is a good way to keep in touch with your customers. But the newsletter should not be so frequent that the subscriber stops going through it.

There are so many newsletters available, so you have to try hard to differentiate. The following things should be kept in mind:

i. Make sure that the newsletter has the information that the customer is deeply interested in. For example, tax-related information is fabulous content for an accountancy firm.

ii. Give information on new product launches or new promotional offers. Give access to download of trial offers through the newsletter.

iii. It should have answers to common queries of your customers about your product. For example, a shop selling MP3 players can answer frequent ques­tions regarding downloading songs in a new format.

Unless you are sure you can regularly gather enough interesting information to generate a newsletter, do not have a periodic newsletter. An uninteresting newslet­ter keeps you in the customers mind but kills their interest in your offering.

Sending mails when there is something of interest will work well. The customer realizes that it is not a periodic communication for your company but is a communication that has been initiated because of a special event. Customer interest in such mails will be high.